Real-Time Online Reporting: Best Practices for Live Blogging

Abstract

Contemporary live online reporting makes the most of converging technological platforms and includes not just text but a range of content including still and moving images and audio. Social media platforms are an important source of content, which is often embedded directly. The resulting news artefact is referred to using a variety of names, including “news streams”, “live updating news pages”, and “live blogs”. This last term has been adopted for the purposes of this chapter. Live blogs are becoming increasingly common, with, for example, the Guardian’s website publishing close to 150 per month. They are also a relatively popular news format: a nine-country survey showed an average of about 15 percent of regular online news consumers use them on a weekly basis. Those levels of reach are complemented by a high degree of engagement, with readers spending, on average, between six and 24 minutes on any given live blog, more time than is typical for visits to online news in other formats. This chapter examines opportunities, risks, and best practices in live blogging. It ends with a suggested exercise involving a scheduled news event and a live blogging platform.